Candy Girl Read online

  Customer: “Was she shaved?”

  YW: “She’s way too naive to think of such a thing.”

  Customer: “How old were you when you fucked her?”

  YW: “Nineteen, so it was, uh, last year?”

  Customer: “So you’re in college then?”

  YW: “I went for a little while, but I dropped out.”***

  Customer (approaching orgasm): “What’s the biggest cock you’ve ever had?”

  YW: “Well…last year I was in a Hungarian porn film.* Actually, it was a series of three films, but none of them are available in the States. My male costar was…he was a count. A Hungarian count. Isn’t that interesting, royalty starring in a porn movie? Anyway, he had a ten-inch cock.”

  Customer (ejaculating): “Blarrrgh. Gnuuuh.”

  Then there were the guys whose psyches were veritable crazy quilts of sexual confusion. “Gay Whore” was one such fellow. An agitated-looking man, he charged into my booth one night as if his chinos were on fire. Armored in J. Crew and a gold wedding band, he appeared to be a typical suburban husband/daddy looking for some clandestine pussy on a Saturday night.

  The first thing he said to me was: “I’ve been dirty. I’ve been watching a movie upstairs.” (S-World offers an eye-popping selection of coin-operated porno-viewing booths for those who can’t be caught renting, i.e., husbands/daddies.)

  “Oh really?” I said.

  “Guess what kind of movie it was,” he said eagerly, as I removed my Target bra and panty set (pink waffle-knit cotton, tres jailbait).

  Well. What does a square typically consider dirty? “Um, was it anal?” I guessed, hoisting my ass into the air to illustrate.

  “That’s part of it,” he said, grinning and masturbating. “It was a bunch of guys.”

  “Really,” said I.

  “Oh yeah,” he said, producing an illegal inhalant and sniffing ardently. “I love cock. I’m gonna meet a guy later who’s gonna fuck me in the ass. And then I’m gonna suck his friend’s dick. I love cock more than anything!” he crowed. “I’m a whore.”

  “You’re a huge whore!” I agreed enthusiastically. “A cock-starved whore!”

  “Look at my faggot dick,” he said, delighted.

  “You know,” I said, “when you first came in here, I thought you seemed like a respectable family man. But now, it’s clear that you’re just a dirty, drug-addled homosexual cum-slut!”

  As I expected, that did it. He came right away, fueled by his own perceived transgressiveness. Then, he was suddenly all business as he zipped up his flat-front chinos. “That was really good,” he said calmly. “Are you here most nights?”

  Without a doubt, the scrutiny of Sex World’s female customers was the dolls’ heaviest cross to bear. Birds are the worst, man. On Saturday nights, I often had the entire shift to myself. Now, working solo was daunting enough on a ordinary night. Every customer in the store gazed at me in my scarlet terrarium, assessing my weight and worth as if I were the last lobster in the tank at Morton’s. However, working alone on a Saturday night was doubly mortifying, because Saturdays meant bachelorette parties. Apparently, blushingly intact Lutheran brides and their attendants think sex shops are an absolute riot. They’d canter into the store, knackered on Flirtinis, wearing homemade bachelorette-themed T-shirts and immediately begin giggling over perfectly vanilla movie titles like Cum Softly, Baby. (I wondered what they’d think about some of the explicit horse-meets-amputee porn on the Internet.) Inevitably, they’d notice me perched in my X-rated diorama, reading Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung and minding my own beeswax. I wasn’t sure if they knew I could hear them talking, or if they cared.

  “Oh my God. Oh my God, Michelle, there’s a girl in there.”

  “No way. That’s a mannequin.”

  “No, she’s totally breathing.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Oh my God!”

  “Gross! What does she do? Do they just pay her to sit in there and read?”

  “I know! I bet she’s supposed to be dancing in there or something.”

  “She’s not that pretty. God. I could do that.”

  “I dare you to go up there and talk to her.”

  “Gross! I don’t want to go near her!”

  And so forth. You’re shit and I’m champagne, I thought to myself, straightening on the lip-shaped divan. I tried to shrug off the dehumanizing remarks, but girls aren’t made of stone. I usually came home on Saturdays, fell into a fitful sleep of back-to-back nightmares and woke up in a blue funk. For the first time, I was losing hit points in the epic battle to maintain my dignity. Girls can be so mean.

  Tricks and Hos

  Many evenings at the peep show, I worked with a girl named Nico. She was the only black girl employed there, a mother of four with a thick, athletic build and eyes like Scharffenberger chocolate. One night, in a moment of candor, Nico revealed to me that she had once been a full-time hooker and occasionally still turned tricks.

  “I promise I won’t tell the other girls,” I said, excited by this revelation.

  “I don’t care if you do or you don’t,” Nico said, sucking the spark out of a freshly ignited Newport. “My whole family knows about it already. Everybody knows.” She stretched out on the velveteen chaise like a panther and stared me down.

  “I got started when I was eighteen. At the time, I only had one kid, my daughter, who was five. I worked out of the back room of a tanning salon called Polynesian Delight. It was a standard storefront; the tanning beds were in the front and our rooms were in the back.”

  “How many girls were working there?” I asked, clamoring for details like Brenda Starr, Reporter, trapped in an ill-maintained aquarium.

  “Ten or fifteen,” Nico said, exhaling a nimbus of smoke. “Mostly white girls, eighteen up to around forty.”

  “How long did you work there?”

  “Until they got popped,” Nico said flatly. “Busted by vice. Then, we all worked out of hotel rooms for a year or so.” She shrugged. “At least we ate good.”

  “Did you make a lot of cash?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah. God, if I’d known then what I know now, I’d still be sitting on that cash I made when I was eighteen. I’d still have money from prostitution. That’s how much hookers make.” She sighed. “Plus, she took us out, the woman that ran the place. Got us in everywhere. Nice restaurants. Clubs. I ate out every night.”

  “I’ve noticed that a lot of girls in the industry do that,” I said, recalling the strippers at Deja Vu who called Hoyt’s for swordfish and prime at the merest sign of hunger pangs. “It’s like food is a status thing for strippers and whores.”

  “Yeah. I would order oysters on the half shell. Calamari. I don’t even like that shit and I ate it,” Nico said, grimacing. Customers passed the window and gawked at us: a girl in a Goth bikini intently questioning a girl in a pink velour tracksuit. Nico’s story rushed out of her like a dirty river.

  “I’d pay my rent four months at a time because I had nothing better to do with my money,” Nico continued. “One day, I called my kid’s babysitter and told her to ask my daughter what toys she saw on TV, and write them all down. When I got home, I went out and bought my daughter everything on the list. I could do stuff like that.” She snuffed out her cigarette. “It was weird having that kind of money.”

  “How much did you get for a trick?”

  “It depended on a lot of things. At a massage parlor, you can get good money for a half-and-half*, but you have to pay a house fee. I did anal for $400, but I didn’t even do it for real. I’d make a fist behind my ass and let them fuck it, or just let them run their dicks up my crack. They couldn’t tell I was faking it. Tricks are made to be tricked. That’s why they’re called that. You trick ’em out of their money.”

  “What about pimps?” I asked. “Have you ever had one?”

  “Let me tell you something crazy about pimps,” Nico said with sudden intensity. “A pimp is nothing but a ho, and a ho ain�
��t nothing but a trick. Let me explain: A pimp fucks a ho to get money, but since he’s fucking for money, he’s a ho. But if a ho fucks a pimp and gives him her money, she’s nothing but a trick.” Nico laughed at the absurdity of the power structure. “That’s why pimps have never had any luck with me. You can’t pimp a pimp.”

  “What’s the most you made?” I asked. I remembered the girls I’d met who mysteriously pocketed stacks of crisp hundreds night after night in the clubs.

  “I got $4,000 once to meet a guy in Mexico,” Nico said proudly. “Four days, a grand a day. All expenses paid. He wouldn’t even give me the cash until I got on the return flight, because he didn’t want me spending my money on the trip.” She grinned. “I also remember one Christmas Eve at the tanning salon. Me and the other girl working each left with $1,500 that night.

  “What happened to it?” I asked. “All the money you made?”

  “I have no idea,” Nico replied, deadpan.

  I still had more questions. “Did you ever have a customer who was so revolting that you couldn’t make yourself fuck him?”

  Nico’s cheeks dimpled in amusement. “You can’t say no. You can’t really turn anyone away when you’re in this business. There were these two guys who smelled really bad; we called them Trench Coat Greg and Shitty Booty Jeff. Trench Coat Greg wasn’t that bad, actually. He was the first man to eat my pussy and get me off. But Shitty Booty Jeff was the worst. I wouldn’t go down on him, just fuck him. Actually, one night, this girl just stared screaming in the hotel room we were sharing. She was supposed to fuck this trick, but his ass was so dirty he left brown streaks on the white sheets. She freaked out.”

  “Wild,” I said. “I couldn’t do it, man.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Nico said. “I turned a trick recently and I got physically ill. It’s so nasty blowing a guy wearing a condom.”

  “You’re still doing that stuff?”

  “Oh yeah. I’ve fucked Vikings for money. I’ve done guys at the club where I dance. Last week, I got a hotel room with this hick, and I pretended to be really naive. I was like, ‘Ooh, I don’t normally do this! I forgot to bring condoms.’ So then, all I had to do was give him a hand job and he paid me. That’s the easiest way to trick a trick. Pretend you don’t have a condom.” Her laugh was brittle. “I even had one guy who offered me $500 to shit on him.”

  “I’d shit on a dude for five hundy,” I remarked. “I mean, I move my bowels for free on a daily basis, right? I might as well turn a profit.”

  “Right,” Nico agreed.

  Since our shift had ended, we swabbed down our booths with alcohol as per the rules. Nico clocked out before me since she was already in her street clothes.

  “See you later, masturbator!” she cracked. I waved as she slipped out the secret door into the ladies’ room.

  The next time I saw Nico, she told me she had been invited to join a trick on a weeklong cruise to Fiji. I congratulated her on this coup, but I never talked to her at length about hooking again. That subject was one of the few taboos in our wee, smoky dollhouse.

  Lick It Up

  At the Dollhouse, I compiled a veritable field guide of peep-show oddities: customers who defied categorization. Like Harriet the Spy in discount swimwear, I recorded my impressions of all of them in my top-secret slut notebook. From Flashlight Guy, who liked to aim a high-powered Mag-Lite up girls’ nostrils and examine their boogies, to Exercise Man, who loved nothing more than watching a girl pant with exertion (I did headstands and fake yoga for him), there was no sexual deviant who escaped my scrutiny.

  But one of these specimens achieved near-cult status at Sex World. A frequent customer, he resembled a Malibu Ken doll, complete with a healthy suntan, impeccable Polo wardrobe and an artfully shellacked hank of blonde hair. At first glance, you’d assume he was just another gay financial analyst loose on the streets of Minneapolis. But the instant he entered the store, he transformed into a pie-eyed, insatiable semen-vampire. Cum Licker’s mission, ostensibly, was to polish each and every peep show booth to a shine. With his tongue.

  My shows with Cum Licker became rather rote after the first couple of times: I’d remove my top (which was really just a formality) while he inspected the booth for cum. If he was lucky, there’d be some ghostly streaks on the glass or a viscous puddle of swimmers on the floor. I would then proceed to talk dirty to Cum Licker while he pawed intently at the cum and asked me questions about how recent it might be, or how many men might have added to it over the course of the evening. He masturbated, but rarely ejaculated. When his ten minutes had ticked down to nothing, he’d beg me to make sure my booth got “extra dirty,” and assure me he’d be back once it did. He’d make me promise to keep the janitors at bay, ensuring that the floor would retain its filth. When I rose to exit the booth, he’d assume the down-dog position and lick up the man-chowder.

  Cum Licker quickly became famous with peep-show employees and store clerks alike. His jaw-droppingly dangerous habit earned him great notoriety. Everyone was witness to his behavior because he not only “cleaned” the peep-show booths, but he also dutifully lapped the floors of the porn-viewing stations. One night when he finally left the store, a clerk announced “Cum Licker has left the building” over the two-way radio. He was like the Elvis of Sex World.

  The peep show was a fucking circus. Literally. Sex World took its big-top theme to the extreme, right down to striped tenting and strains of calliope music that burst from a penis-shaped wishing well at fifteen-minute intervals. Working in the center of that ghastly clownhouse was taking a toll on my sanity.

  Oddly, however, I’d never felt safer at a job than I did at the Dollhouse.

  At the agency, I’d been a professional scapegoat. Every morning, I’d settle into my cubicle with a tight chest and an acid stomach. So much shit could go haywire in one nine-hour day. My boss’s boss, an expressionless art nerd who wore exclusively black, scared the bejesus out of me. Seriously; I’d rather have faced down a clone army of Cum Lickers than spend fifteen seconds chatting with this dude. He was so sober that every status meeting felt like a baby’s funeral. He genuinely cared about the kerning on a four-color point-of-sale pamphlet. And I sensed he knew I was bogus, bullshit, an interloper. He knew I did half-assed work. When I announced I was quitting, he coldly replied, “I’m not surprised” in his Indo-British accent.

  The peep show was different. It was like an artificial womb. When I was in the booth, I felt like the Dionne quintuplets in their glass nursery: on display for all, but ultimately protected. I’d never get in trouble for misplacing a file folder at the peep show or skipping a crucial conference call to Brazil. I could work drunk, and often did (until the day I passed out with a cigarette and burned a hole in the Dollhouse carpet). All I had to do was show up, take direction and relax certain muscle groups. It was easy.

  Night shifts were weirdly cozy. The same misanthropic crew of clerks was always present and accounted for. Although the “real employees” generally distrusted the peep-show girls, they’d occasionally banter with me over the two-way radio. There was a collective air of resignation, and a no-future philosophy I found exhilarating. At the end of a shift, I’d peel off my drag and put the wig in my locker. I walked past two strip clubs to get to my car. I imagined the bodies moving behind the tinted windows and felt both nostalgia and remorse about my time as a dancer.

  Dollhouse Girls Don’t Have All the Answers

  During the day, I lived a life of stripperly sloth, rising around 10:00, chowing down a bowl of Special K with soy milk and watching insipid dating shows for hours. I didn’t do housework or prep meals. I couldn’t even be bothered to change out of my jammies until it was absolutely necessary. Around 4:00, I’d bus downtown and meet Jonny for vodka martinis. We’d get plowed on Ketel One and share a basket of cheese curds. Then I’d head down the street, smoking one of the cigarettes to which I’d suddenly become addicted. Life had no aim, which could be righteous or depressing depending on the da
y.

  I worked a static shift at the peep show: six o’clock until shortly past midnight. By the time I’d stashed my “Slim Jane” translucent anal plug in my locker and changed out of my lube-sticky bikini, the remaining dolls would be yawning into their spiked coffee. I remember there was a sign on the wall near my locker that read DOLLHOUSE GIRLS DON’T HAVE ALL THE ANSWERS, posted by our manager in a moment of irritation. The lady was a beat poet and she didn’t know it. Her hastily scrawled memos always came out sounding like proverbs.

  As I punched out like a knackered factory grunt, the overnight girls filed past me to punch in, a dour skeleton crew with plummy circles beneath their eyes. On the nights I’d done a lot of dildo shows, I affected a bowlegged gait to illustrate the devastation incurred below, a gag that never failed to disgust the girls who were strangely squeamish about our trade.

  The head security guard, a beetle-browed medieval-weapons enthusiast, usually walked me to my car while yakking pleasantly about his adventures in mortuary college. Most dolls got a “walk-out,” as it was called, to curtail stalkers and the pustulant shitfaced collegiate types who sniffed around the area after dark. (One of the dolls had actually been followed home once, by a customer who was into some really sick B&D shit. She’d managed to evade him, but still recounted the story with a quavering voice.) I never really fretted about being stalked, because I looked almost unrecognizable without my wig. But I still appreciated the walk-outs.

  “Did you see a lot of pricks tonight?” asked my temporary bodyguard, my dolly grip.

  I always had the same reply: “Dude, my eyes!”

  At home, Jonny always woke up to greet me. He’d wrap his arms around me and kiss me with extra tongue, even if I warned him that I was feeling like the communal ass-towel at a Turkish bath. I could hear his smile in the dark as he asked me which freaks I’d serviced that evening.